Philip Stark, a professor in the Department of Statistics and Associate Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, has conducted extensive research to demonstrate that student evaluations do not measure teaching effectiveness. More significantly, his research demonstrates that student evaluations are often biased against female instructors. Professor Stark’s work was recently profiled in a Chronicle of Higher Education article “How One Professor Is Trying to Paint a Richer Portrait of Effective Teaching” (June 16, 2016).
Stark and his colleagues, Anne Boring and Kellie Ottoboni, published the original study “Student evaluations of teaching (mostly) do not measure teaching effectiveness” (7 January 2016), in the open access journal ScienceOpen.com. Since its publication, according to metrics provided by the journal, the article has had more than 26,000 readers, been tweeted 200 times, and been mentioned in multiple news outlets and blogs. Its Altmetric score is “in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.” (Altmetrics is a system which uses non-traditional metrics to gauge an article’s impact.)
Publication of this article was made possible by the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII). Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library, BRII provides funding to Berkeley authors who wish to make their research findings free to all readers immediately upon publication. The purpose of BRII is to foster broad public access to the work of Berkeley scholars by encouraging the Berkeley community to take advantage of open access publishing opportunities.
Post contributed by Margaret Phillips, Education Librarian, Gender & Women’s Studies Librarian